Equal: Women Reshape American Law
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The dramatic, untold story of how women battled blatant inequities in America's legal system.
As late as 1967, men outnumbered women twenty to one in American law schools. With the loss of deferments from Vietnam, reluctant law schools began admitting women to avoid plummeting enrollments. As women entered, the law resisted. Judges would not hire women. Law firms asserted a right to discriminate against women. Judges permitted discrimination by employers against pregnant women. Courts viewed sexual harassment as, one judge said, "a game played by the male superiors." Violence against women seemed to exist beyond the law’s comprehension.
In this landmark book, Fred Strebeigh shows how American law advanced, far and fast. He brings together legal evidence and personal histories to portray the work of concerned women and men to advance legal rights in America. Equal combines interviews with litigators, plaintiffs, and judges, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Catharine MacKinnon, along with research from private archives of attorneys who took cases to the Supreme Court, to narrate battles waged against high odds and pinnacles of legal power. Equal, in the words of Professor Suzanne A. Kim of Rutgers Law School, is a book for "anyone interested in how each individual can improve our society through compassion, drive, and creativity."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beyond the hot-button issue of abortion, feminist lawyers and scholars have worked a quieter but equally far-reaching revolution in law and jurisprudence, argues this fascinating history. Strebeigh, a journalist who teaches nonfiction writing at Yale, chronicles 40 years of changing law on employment discrimination, sexual harassment and rape, as a growing movement of women lawyers, professors and judges challenged a primordial legal sexism. (Courts, for example, used to insist that rape victims fight their attackers almost to the death to prove lack of consent.) The author lucidly explains the intricacies of evolving legal doctrine (the federal Violence Against Women Act hung awkwardly from the Constitution's commerce clause) and the devilishly complex litigation strategies lawyers pursued to insinuate new concepts into case law. But his account is really the story of an insurgency percolating up from consciousness-raising groups and feminist law school seminars; pioneered by theorists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Catharine Mackinnon; fought out by plucky, underpaid lawyers working in hostile courts; and climaxing in constitutional and political showdowns deep inside the Supreme Court. The result is a keen assessment of how far the law has come and of the struggle that propelled it.
